In recent weeks, controversy in Israel has surrounded the documentary “NAZA” by filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. According to reports, it relies in part on anonymous testimony from soldiers and intelligence personnel, and raises serious allegations about targeting decisions in Gaza and harm to civilians.
I have not watched the film, and I do not intend to criticize scenes I have not seen or testimony I have not heard. I can, however, write about what NAZA means and what happens behind the process it describes.
I do so not as an outside researcher but as someone who took part in dozens of discussions in which anticipated collateral damage was central to deciding whether a strike would be approved, changed, delayed or canceled.
Before turning to military and legal terminology, imagine yourself in the decision-maker’s chair. Reliable intelligence indicates that a terrorist operative in a house in your city is directing a suicide bomber already on his way to a crowded shopping mall and awaiting the final order. The operative’s wife and children are also inside. They are not targets. A ground raid might capture him, but it could also alert him and give him time to send the bomber forward. An airstrike could kill him, but it could also kill his family. Waiting carries its own risks.
What is the moral decision? There is no clean answer.
Not every targeting decision looks like this, but the dilemma is real: action, delay and inaction can all carry human costs. That is precisely why the laws of armed conflict exist and why a decision-making process precedes a strike.
NAZA, a Hebrew acronym used by the Israel Defense Forces that derives from the nezek agavi for collateral damage, is not a permit to harm civilians or a quota for “how many civilians may be killed.” It is an assessment of the unintended harm that a strike on a military target is expected to cause to civilians and civilian property. Commanders must weigh that assessment when determining proportionality, possible precautions and, sometimes, whether to strike at all.
Questions that came up in the room
During my IDF service, I held several positions in the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) and participated in dozens of discussions connected to the development and approval of targets.
I also served as a COGAT officer during “Operation Cast Lead (2008-09),” “Operation Pillar of Defense (2012)” and “Operation Protective Edge (2014)” in Gaza. The tension I am describing was not theoretical. We were part of a system enabling the IDF to operate against terrorist organizations, while also coordinating the movement of Red Cross vehicles, the evacuation of wounded people and the transfer of patients from Gaza to Israel for continued medical care. Both happened at the same time. War does not divide neatly into an “operational” world and a “humanitarian” one.
For security reasons, I cannot describe specific targets or the full approval process. I can describe the questions that repeatedly came up in the room.
A strike does not begin when an aircraft takes off. Long before that, professionals examine what makes a target a military objective, what military advantage is expected from striking it, who may be nearby and how risk to civilians can be reduced.
The inquiry doesn’t end with identifying a weapons depot, command post, production facility or individual operative. The environment matters. Is the target beside homes, a school, shops or another civilian facility? What nearby structures could be affected? What munition is appropriate? From what direction should the strike be carried out? At what time is civilian risk lower?
War does not divide neatly into an “operational” world and a “humanitarian” one.
I remember discussions in which there was no dispute that the target was a legitimate military objective. The question was when to strike it. If too many uninvolved civilians were nearby, one option was to wait. Sometimes, a target that had already been approved was not struck because the conditions for execution had not yet been met.
That may sound obvious from the outside. In war, it is not. Waiting can allow a terrorist to leave, weapons to be moved or an operational opportunity to disappear. Yet that is what it means for anticipated civilian harm to be part of the decision rather than an explanation offered afterward.
The method of attack is not necessarily fixed either. I sat in discussions in which the plan changed because of a nearby building, the presence of civilians or an assessment that the proposed method could cause excessive damage around the target. The question was not simply “strike or do not strike.” Sometimes, the answer was to change the timing, method or munition to achieve the same military purpose with less risk.
Another crucial point is that approval of a target is not an automatic authorization to press the button under any circumstances. Hours or more may pass between planning and execution. People enter and leave buildings. Children may appear where none were present before. Intelligence may change. Even after a target has passed the approval chain, the final question can be simple: Do the conditions we see now still match the conditions on which the strike was approved?
Assessing proportionality and precautions
I witnessed situations in which they did not. A change in civilian presence, the surrounding environment or new information could mean that the strike would not proceed as planned. Time already invested in planning did not make execution automatic.
Human shields must also be understood accurately. A terrorist organization that deliberately uses civilians to shield military activity violates the laws of war. But that doesn’t turn those civilians into military targets. Their presence must still be considered when assessing proportionality and precautions.
There is a paradox here. To someone unfamiliar with military decision-making, estimating how many civilians may be harmed can sound as if the military is assigning a price to human life. In my experience, the logic is the opposite. Civilian harm is assessed precisely because civilians are not the target and because their lives must be part of the decision.
None of this means war is sterile. Civilians can die even when a military attacks a legitimate target, applies precautions and acts within the law. That is one of war’s great tragedies, especially in dense urban areas where terrorist organizations operate from within civilian populations.
Nor does any of this mean that a large military fighting a long war cannot make mistakes, suffer failures or encounter cases in which personnel violate orders or the law. Part of the system is the obligation to examine exceptional incidents and learn from them. During “Protective Edge,” the IDF activated a General Staff fact-finding mechanism to examine exceptional incidents; that mechanism remains active in the current war.
Mechanisms exist to draw lessons
Accountability can also have personal consequences. After the April 2024 strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen workers, an IDF investigation found serious failures in identification and decision-making, and concluded that the strike violated procedure. Two officers were removed from their posts, and senior commanders were reprimanded.
That case does not prove that the system always works. It proves something different: When it fails, mechanisms exist to determine why, draw lessons and, where appropriate, impose consequences. There is, therefore, a fundamental difference between arguing that mistakes, violations or flawed judgments occurred in particular cases and treating the very existence of a collateral-damage assessment as evidence of indifference to civilian life.
When judging a military strike, the outcome alone does not tell the whole story. Civilian deaths are painful and consequential. But to understand whether a decision was lawful and proportionate, one must also ask what the decision-maker knew at the time, what the military objective was, what advantage was expected, what civilian harm could reasonably have been anticipated, what alternatives existed and what was done to reduce that harm.
There is an essential difference between judging a decision after seeing its consequences and judging it based on the information available when the decision had to be made. Those questions are harder to capture in a headline or a disturbing image, but they are the questions commanders must ask before giving an order to strike.
I was there. I sat in rooms where those questions were asked, where professionals debated them and where the answer was sometimes not “strike,” but “not yet”—“not this way” or “not now.”
That is what I want the public to understand: NAZA is not a green light for collateral damage; it is a mechanism designed to limit it.
